Historic yellow jersey for Mauritius at Tour de France: Kimberley Le Court leader among women
For the first time in the history of cycling, both men’s and women’s, there is a yellow jersey at the Tour de France that comes from Mauritius. She is a 29-year-old girl, her name is Kimberley Le Court Pienaar, and today at the end of the second stage of the women’s Grande Boucle, won by 41-year-old Spanish rider from Palma de Mallorca Mavi Garcia, she took the yellow jersey.
She is indeed first in the standings on par with the Dutch Marianne Vos, but the symbol of supremacy belongs to her by virtue of the best placings in the two fractions held so far. Le Court, whose Mauritius national champion jersey is reminiscent of the rainbow jersey, had already made history in April, when by imposing herself in the women’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège she became the first representative of African cycling, again men and women, to win a monumental classic. Now the yellow jersey at the Tour.
“Cycling in Mauritius is little thing – her words -, let’s just say that when I started in 2013 it almost didn’t exist. But I chose it because back home my parents and brother practiced it”. So she also chose two wheels despite the fact that, since she also played soccer, a U.S. university had offered her a scholarship because of her prowess in ‘soccer’.
After spending a year in Britain without ever getting paid, Kim had returned home devoting herself mostly to mountain biking, to the point of earning a contract in 2023 with AG Insurance-Soudal, with which her South African husband Ian Pienaar, also a cyclist, had put her in touch. Last year the return also to the road, with a stage win in the Giro, in 2025 the Liège and now the yellow jersey, two dreams that in both cases made her burst into tears.
An’other curiosity related to the Women’s Tour and today’s stage, is that it was marked, before Garcia’s winning lunge, by the breakaway along with German Franzisk Koch of 34-year-old Frenchwoman Aude Biannic, who is the only mother in the race among the 176 athletes taking part in this Tour.
A figure that gives pause for thought: evidently the maternity leave instituted by the Uci in 2020, which allows female cyclists to continue to receive 100 percent of their salary until three months after giving birth, and then assigns them a variable percentage at the discretion of the teams until they return to competition, is not working, or is not pushing toward parenthood. Biannic then caught up and eventually placed 108th, more than 12 minutes behind Mavi Garcia.
